In contemporary Cairo, some women who have intimate and sexual relationships with other women identify as “lesbians,” even if they do not speak English. Others, who are often multilingual, use the Arabic word “mythlia,” (from the root “sameness”) which they translate as “lesbian.” And still, a number of women do not translate their intimate same-sex relations into any label, identity or politics. Through an engagement with the life history narratives of eleven women who are intimately and sexually involved with other women in contemporary Cairo, my paper attempts to capture the complex lives of these women as they embody and construct their gender and sexuality in their everyday lives. In addition to paying close attention to the forms of homosocial spaces that these women create amongst each other, I also explore how embodiments and performances of sexuality shift as these women move in and outside of homosocial spaces. This paper is based primarily upon ethnographic research that I conducted in the summer of 2010 in Cairo, Egypt. I also draw on the work of Saba Mahmood who, in her study of a women’s mosque movement in Cairo, has argued against the “universality of the desire…to be free from relations of subordination” and the “naturalization of freedom as a social ideal” (2005:10). Thus, rather than equate agency with resistance to social norms, with coming and speaking out against the normative demands of heterosexuality, I seek to explore the variety of agentive modalities (including but not limited to resistance) that help fashion and constitute the experiences and subjectivities of women who have intimate relations with other women in Cairo. In this paper I attempt to parochialize normative constructions of homosexuality that view identifying as a “lesbian” and being “out” as universally desirable and liberating and are based upon a teleological conception of progress and what Martin Manalansan (2003) calls “gay modernity.”